Alex Barclay - Blood Runs Cold

Jo nodded. ‘OK, sure. You do that. I knew I’d only have it for a little while. And I’m sorry I broke it.’

‘You didn’t break it,’ said Ren.

It was designed to come apart. Otherwise you couldn’t plug it into a USB port .

Ren turned to Billy. ‘I’m just going out to the Jeep for a little while. I’ll be back.’

‘Sure, no problem. Is everything OK?’

‘Absolutely.’ She turned to Jo. ‘Thank you.’

‘A pleasure,’ said Jo, sitting down on her corner stool, looking down at her vast, bare cleavage.

Ren grabbed her laptop from the trunk of the Jeep and sat in the front seat. She turned on the heating in the car. She dropped the bottom half of the damp pendant — the cap of the USB flash drive — into the driver’s door and held the part with the USB drive against the vents.

What files have you saved on to this?

Ren’s fingers started to burn in the hot air. She shook the drive. Please dry . After a little while she checked it. There was no way of telling. She plugged it in and a little white disk icon appeared on her screen. Ren clicked on it. There were three files. The first was a Word document called ‘listassaults’. The second was a jpg, numbered. The third was just called ‘letterforpsych’. The list of names was no surprise to Ren — the young girls, the abuse.

The jpg stalled when she tried to open it. When it did open, it was a small, blurred image taken with a cellphone camera. It looked pixilated — a mess of shapes and colors — but it wasn’t. Ren stared at it closely. She had seen it before: in a drawing on the little girls’ file in her office, signed Ruth XX. Here in a tiny, badly lit photo. And also at exactly the location the photo had been taken in. Her heart pounded.

I know what this is.

Suddenly, a face appeared at the driver’s window.

‘Jesus Christ!’ She rolled down the window. ‘Are you fucking insane?’

‘What are you doing out here?’ said Billy. ‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m working,’ said Ren, pulling down the laptop screen.

‘I was worried, that’s all.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘OK. Jesus. You just ran out — ’

‘See you inside.’

She opened the last file, ‘letterforpsych’. The heading was ‘Jennifer Mayer’: Jennifer Mayer sat in the last pew of the condemned church, her eleven-year-old body starved and bruised and torn. Her hazel eyes were vacant, but held more than she ever wanted to know. She slid to the edge, gripped the rail and walked slowly up the aisle, her steps off, her toes pointed; a tiny, broken ballerina. She wore nothing but a flower girl’s tight smile as she strew blood-stained petals from a basket that hung on her forearm.On the altar, in a wreath of fresh lilies, was her last school photograph. She took the three long steps up the soft red carpet to the altar. On a marble plinth in front of her stood a baptismal font with a drying pool of holy water. She reached in and splashed it on to her face, wiping away dirt, revealing wounds she couldn’t feel. In God’s safe house, a strange parody of disordered sacraments: baptism, marriage and death, communion with evil and confirmation that she would never be the same again.She looked into the eyes of all the statues around the church. In an alcove was a portrait of the French saint, St Jean-Marie Vianney. She had learned about him at school. He had found strength in going without food or sleep. He could heal the sick, especially children. Jean. She turned her head to face the huge cross that hung behind the altar. Transom: the horizontal beam on a cross … or gallows.So … I can come back to life. Or I can die.

Ren closed the file. It was therapy. A letter to a psychiatrist, written in the third person, to help her get through it. Jean Transom was Jennifer Mayer, the pretty little girl who had been abducted with her friend, Ruth Sleight, and held for three weeks in a place where they should have been discovered.

She called Paul Louderback. Then she re-read the last line of the letter: “So … I can come back to life. Or I can die.”

And Jean Marie Transom did both .

Salem Swade’s cabin was in black mountain darkness, but inside, a muted light glowed. Ren walked around its neat, rotted log walls and boarded-up windows, the beam of her Maglite low on the ground. On the east side, the one remaining window revealed nothing of what lay on the other side. Ren rubbed her forearm across it and got nothing but a sleeve covered in dirt and a spider hanging from her cuff by its silver thread. She paused, sucked in by its manic search for purchase. Holding the flashlight between her teeth, she pinched the thread from her cuff, setting the spider free on the dry earth.

She grabbed the light, then moved around the front of the cabin to the door. She paused, listening to the two voices that were talking inside. She knocked and worked at the rusted doorknob until it gave way. Powdered wood fell from the frame on to the floor.

The smell was pine pot-pourri over locker room, prison, hospital air. Her stomach shifted.

‘Hello,’ said Salem, raising his hand to wave. He was wearing a red, button-down long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of light cotton trousers. A little skinny Santa Claus .

‘Hello, Salem,’ said Ren. ‘Didn’t I tell you I’d come to see you?’ She smiled. ‘I brought you up … some soda.’ She lay a cooler box on the floor by the table. A living room/kitchen ran the length of the cabin with two rooms off it to the rear, one with a door, one without. To her right was the kitchen area, to her left was the living area with a rocking chair, a generator, some candles and the rotted stumps of two trees. Across one wall, blocking the window she had tried to look through, were six ceiling-high stacks of the Summit Daily News . She closed the door to the fresh air behind her.

Malcolm Wardwell was standing by the stove in the kitchen, heating food. There were some empty plastic containers beside him.

‘Hello,’ said Ren.

‘Hello,’ said Malcolm. He turned quickly back to the food. ‘Jason,’ he called out.

Jason Wardwell came out from the back room.

‘This is …’ said Malcolm, turning to Ren. ‘I’m sorry, what was your name again?’

‘Ren Bryce. I’m with the FBI.’ She reached out a hand to Jason.

‘Hi,’ said Jason, giving her a firm handshake.

What are you doing here? I thought you and your father had fallen out .

Salem walked her way. ‘Everyone wants to feed Salem,’ he said. ‘People been trying to put meat on these bones since I was a boy.’

‘To be fair,’ said Jason, ‘you know how to put it away. Just where, though, is the thing. That’s one of those secrets the ladies would love to know.’ He glanced at Ren.

‘Hell, yeah,’ said Ren. ‘The only places I can think to put it are on my big fat hips and my big fat ass.’

‘Well … I wasn’t including you in the ladies,’ said Jason.

Ren laughed. Oh dear — have you ever spoken to a woman before in your life?

‘Back out while you can,’ said Salem to Jason. ‘Slowly.’ He turned to Ren. ‘Take a seat,’ he said.

‘No thank you,’ said Ren. She still stood by the door, scanning the room.

Salem wandered away, half talking to himself. ‘You don’t leave people,’ he said. ‘You take hits. You take hits for yourself, you take hits for others. You take the bullets. You send ’em back. That’s the kind of shit that happens. That’s the kind of shit.’

‘You’re not wrong, buddy,’ said Jason. ‘Tell us about that time on the river, Salem.’

‘You don’t need to do that,’ said Ren.

Jason glanced at her. ‘It’s OK, it’s a funny story.’